How does Whoopi love Pelosi, let me count the ways

Even before Pelosi walked on stage to take her seat at the round table, the show’s moderator, Whoopi Goldberg, and its co-hosts – with former news anchor Barbara Walters leading the pack – started flirting with the speaker’s husband, Paul, who was seated in the front row.

“You wanna take a look at Nancy Pelosi’s handsome husband?” Walters asked the audience. Yes, came the answer in the form of whooping and hollering.

Poor guy was actually blushing. Then the show’s hosts asked him how long he and Madame Speaker have been married.

“Forty-four years,” Mr. Pelosi managed between pained glances in the direction of a blanket, a paper bag, anything to hide under.

Whoopi got the pleasure of introducing Speaker Pelosi, who she noted is the first woman speaker of the House who, somewhere along the way, managed to raise five children.

But Walters was still stuck on Mr. Pelosi, unfortunately for Mr. Pelosi. And this is where a little blushing turned to a Code Red alert, four-alarm fire.

Trying to shout over Whoopi and her other gabbing co-hosts and excited audience members, Barbara turned to Guest Pelosi and said she has heard Whoopi say before that she’d “do Paul Newman.”

“And I think she’d like to do your husband as well,” Walters deadpanned in that quintessential accent that made her the subject of late-night lampooning over the decades.

Of course, Whoopi being Whoopi, she couldn’t let that one go, which is where the speaker begins blushing.

Yes, Whoopi implicitly acknowledged, she’d like to do Mr. Pelosi – but she might take his wife while she’s at it. “I would do her as well. But we should wait on that because you’re still in office, I don’t want to cause a problem.”

Unfortunately I couldn’t find a way to embed the awkward episode on the blog, but if you go to The View you can probably find it. It’s “The View: Nancy Pelosi Part 1”.

Update 10/3/07:Allah Pundit at Hot Air did us all the great favor of transferring the video to YouTube. Watch and shudder.